There are a lot of junky horror movies and ORPHAN ends up being one of them. But one of the nice things about the horror genre is that even in its bad manifestations, there are often individual moments or scenes that merit attention. Long after I’ve forgotten most of the details of THE OMEN (another “evil child” movie), for instance, I still remember the scene where a sheet of glass slides off a crashed truck and neatly decapitates a guy. His head then rolls and bounces a couple of times on the see-through glass, scattering reflections hither and yon.

Something equally memorable happens in ORPHAN, but not in a visually striking way. Instead, it’s a dramatic scene that’s every bit as disturbing as a detached head bobbing on glass. And of course it involves Esther, our evil child orphan.

The movie begins, more or less, with the adoption of a nine-year-old Russian orphan named Esther by a well-to-do and well-educated American family. She’s a highly articulate and precocious child with a penchant for rather old-fashioned clothes. Early on, her new parents dote on her, and the younger deaf daughter seems to quickly bond with her new and older sister. Only the son has a problem with her initially but then that seems to reflect more about him than her. He takes an immediate dislike to her primarily because she seems to take attention away from him.

Sympathy for Esther is also engendered by the fact she’s so rudely ridiculed at school. A whiff of Columbine vengeance crosses her face but at the time it seems entirely understandable.

It’s not long, of course, before her true colors surface. She brilliantly manipulates the various family members by exacerbating deeply buried family tensions. She eventually pits kids against parents and parents against each other.

At this point, ORPHAN has the potential to be a top-drawer psychological thriller. Unfortunately, it cops out, ultimately preferring horror shock and violence to delicately nuanced character development.

But it does manage to pull off one creepy, discomfiting scene very near the film’s climax. [SPOILER ALERT] Without giving too much away, I can tell you that on this particular night both the son and the mom happen to be in the hospital and Esther has stolen the deaf daughter’s hearing device. That leaves our evil child, for all intents and purposes, alone with the dad. And she takes full advantage. Esther first trims his wife’s black negligee so that it fits her petite body, fluffs up her hair, and puts on makeup and very red lipstick. She then saunters up to the by now very drunk husband and tries to seduce him.

The preview audience I saw this with audibly gasped. It’s definitely shocking. It may speak to the infantilization of the American male, I suppose, but the overriding sense I had was more about the sexualization of the child. Believe me, it doesn’t seem too big a jump at all to go fromJon Benet Ramsey to Esther.

After generating this bracingly disturbing image, the film comes up with a surprise ending that tends to mitigate the disturbance. But the shock lingers nonetheless. And my hunch is that long after I’ve forgotten most of the details of ORPHAN’s narrative, it’ll be this scene that joins the pantheon of memorable moments in otherwise unremarkable horror films.